Email to Students

Students,

For the past few years the Economics Department has been enforcing two policies I believe to be unethical, and I feel obligated to disclose them to you.

In order to convince Cengage to give the Provost a large monetary grant, the department agreed to require all ECN 211 and 212 students use MindTap - a Cengage product. This deal requires students to pay just to turn in their homework. Instructors who were making assignments available on Blackboard/Canvas have been forced to move those same assignments behind the MindTap paywall to ensure students must pay Cengage to pass the class. Students are being saddled with unnecessary costs so the Provost can fund a pet project.

The second policy was put in place to ensure that the Provost's project was made to look good. All ECN 211, 212, and 221 courses were required to prevent at least 30% of students from passing the class. We were told that we needed to set a baseline against which the Provost's project could be compared. For many instructors, this meant setting students up to fail so it could seem like the Provost swooped in and fixed a problem that doesn't exist.

I found both of these policies to be highly unethical and said so to Dean Hillman. In response, the economics department has decided to let me go. I am hoping all of you can continue the fight against this corruption. I hope you will do two things:

• Send an email to President Crow and Dean Hillman asking them to take action to end these policies and to ensure that this does not happen again. Their email addresses are amy.hillman@asu.edu and michael.crow@asu.edu. You can send a pre-filled email with this link: Send an Email.
• Forward this email to other students who are not majoring in economics, but who have taken or are taking these courses. You can also send them to this website copy of the email.

It may not seem like much, but I promise you that if you send an email now it will spur real action on this issue.

Sincerely,

Brian Goegan